In November 1912, museum founder Charles Lang Freer first displayed two rare antique biblical manuscripts in the unexpected setting of the Peacock Room. Decorated in 1876 and 1877 by James McNeill Whistler while the room was part of a London residence, the Peacock Room had been acquired by Freer, carefully taken apart, and reinstalled in a special annex of his mansion in Detroit, Michigan. Freer kept the biblical manuscripts, which he purchased in Giza, Egypt, in 1906, in a fireproof safe behind the room’s leaded-glass door.

Six years later Freer opened the Peacock Room to the public. He juxtaposed the lustrous Asian ceramics with Buddhist sculpture and two parchment Bibles: a codex of the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Joshua, and another of the Four Gospels. Now known as the Codex Washingtonensis or the Freer Gospel, it is the third-oldest manuscript of the Gospels in the world. Bringing these works into a visual conversation with the varied ceramics and extravagant decorations of the Peacock Room underscores Freer’s belief in cross-cultural and transhistorical aesthetic connections.

Freer acquired these manuscripts, along with a fifth-century codex of the Psalms and a sixth-century codex of the Pauline Epistles, in 1906 from the Egyptian antiquities dealer Ali Arabi. The elegant Greek calligraphy and the aura of ages past appealed to Freer’s connoisseurial sensibilities. He confessed he was “completely carried off” his feet at the prospect of owning such rare treasures, and he promised to reward Al Arabi with a gold watch if American scholars confirmed the manuscripts’ authenticity. The following year, Freer returned to Egypt with the watch.

In hopes of learning more about his prized acquisitions, Freer commissioned scholars at the University of Michigan to conduct biblical research. In 1912 Professor Henry Sanders published a commentary on the Freer Gospel that was of great interest to clergy and press alike. His study revealed this manuscript includes a passage at the end of the book of Mark (after 16:14) that is not found in any other known version of the Gospels. Referred to as the Freer logion, it says, in part:

And Christ replied to them, “The term of years for Satan’s power has been fulfilled, but other terrible things draw near. And for those who have sinned I was delivered over to death so that they may return to the truth and no longer sin, so that they may inherit the spiritual and incorruptible glory of righteousness that is in heaven.”

Originally protected with an undecorated wooden binding and simple leather ties, the Freer Gospel was adorned in the seventh century with paintings of the four evangelists: Matthew and John to the left, with Mark and Luke to the right. Resembling deacons, their hands are draped as if holding a codex for liturgical use. The enduring brilliance of the painted surface is due to the use of encaustic, in which pigments are mixed with molten beeswax that then dries to a shiny, smooth finish. The chain at the top would have prevented the book from fully opening. This suggests the volume became a venerated relic after several centuries of liturgical use.

Back and front covers of Washington Manuscript III: The Four Gospels
Egypt, 7th century
Encaustic on wood
Gift of Charles Lang Freer F1906.297 and F1906.298

Washington Manuscript I: Deuteronomy and Joshua

Among Freer’s prized possessions were folios of Greek text, written in the late fourth or early fifth century, relating to the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. The 102 parchment leaves of this Old Testament codex are gathered into booklets, or quires. Each of the sixty quires is numbered on the first page. The numbers in Freer’s codex begin with 37 and continue through 60, indicating the first thirty-six quires (likely the books of Genesis through Numbers) are missing. This manuscript shows an early example of rubrication, the use of red ink to emphasize text divisions. Rubrication became a common practice in Christian manuscripts beginning in the seventh century.

“Marvelous Story of the Discovery of an Authentic Manuscript of the Bible”

Neither a bibliophile, devout Christian, or classical scholar, Charles Lang Freer acted with uncharacteristic impetuousness when he purchased the four volumes now known as the Freer Manuscripts. The sand-encrusted volumes that he “bought in the forenoon and paid for in the afternoon” of December 19, 1906, were acquired in the shadow of the pyramids at Giza. For Freer, these antique texts represented an entirely new area of collecting, one that at first glance appears to have little relationship to his existing holdings of Asian and American artworks. Early in 1906, some ten months before embarking for his first tour of Egypt, Freer had bequeathed his art collection to the Smithsonian Institution. Despite its diversity of objects, Freer envisioned his gift to the nation as a harmonious whole, and he began a years-long process of culling and organizing his treasures into a more unified totality. He also continued to add to his holdings. He was particularly interested in linking its more modern works to “articles of beauty and sympathy of earlier or earliest origin,” as he put it. Exhibiting the biblical manuscripts in the Peacock Room in Detroit in 1912 was a way to showcase two of his most prized possessions. It was also a dress rehearsal of sorts of the carefully orchestrated “story of the beautiful” that became an enduring narrative of the Freer Gallery of Art.